1077 and all that

The Cluny Museum in Paris has probably the best medieval collection in Europe - illustrated manuscripts, church ornaments and tapestries, including the famous Lady with the Unicorn. By the time of the revolution, there were only five monks left in the great Burgundian monastery of Cluny, but it had once been a European power, centre of a monastic system that stretched from Scotland to Poland. In its great days - the 11th century, the core of Tom Holland's book - it had vast economic weight because the monks were far ahead with agriculture, but for the poor put-upon peasantry, it also meant a point of warmth in a very cold world. As the feudal system began to develop, local lords built their castles and sent out their chain-mailed retainers to exact dues and services, drove the peasants into debt, and turned them into serfs. The monks, whose monastery was itself constructed on castle lines, gave them protection. Well-intentioned people left land and money to the Cluniacs, and they became quite rich. The popes in Rome developed a bureaucratic system, and the church was powerful enough to defy rulers.

Millennium

:
The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom

by
Tom Holland

This is not an era that is easy for an outsider to understand, and "medieval" is not a compliment in any language. There is a splendid book, Régine Pernoud's Pour en Finir avec le Moyen Age, which explains that to understand the middle ages, you have to appreciate that, for them, faith had the same role as physical health does for us. The points for comparison make an amusing party game, what with jogging as penitence and persecution of those modern heretics, smokers. The first millennium, 1000 AD, provides Holland with a good starting point. Various exaltés, their heads stuffed with the Book of Revelation, predicted the end of the world. They died of disappointment.

Holland mentions the millennium scare of 1000 AD, but moves on: the essential dates are 1054, 1066, 1071 and 1077. The book ends with 1095, when the first crusade was proclaimed and Europe moved into the high middle ages: the age of the great cathedrals, when her supremacy in machinery, weaponry, the management of credit and much else got under way. Religion was central to this, and there is even a plausible theory that it led to the invention of clocks, because monks had so many rituals to perform. It is perfectly right for Holland to claim a great deal for the 11th century, of which his book is a splendid, highly coloured canvas.

The central drama, which opens the book, is the battle between a papacy and a German imperialism that were both developing fast. Canossa (1077) has entered the world's vocabulary: a German emperor, Henry IV, standing in the snow, barefoot and penitent, outside an Apennine rock-fortress, begging a pope for forgiveness. The pope kept him waiting because he did not quite know what to do (which had been Henry's intention). If he forgave, he let down his German allies; if he did not, he abandoned his own Christian doctrine. But at bottom, there was a question of great significance for the future: should church and state be separate? Emperor and pope had been fighting over who had the right to nominate bishops. Often enough, Germans would arrive with an army in Rome and - sometimes with the support, sometimes not, of Roman aristocrats manipulating mobs - would sit their own Leo or Clement on the rickety papal throne. But as the Cluniac system grew in importance, so did popes, with a sense of their own role as heirs of St Peter. Gregory VII was one such, and, as a German himself, he could play Germans. He was also dealing with a Christianity beginning to re-define itself, and in 1057 there was a battle in Milan as to who should be bishop. Milan was home to a version of what we might now call "bazaar Islam". A reformist movement, the Patarenes, attacked priests for marrying: they wanted celibacy, and one possessed Cardinal, Pier Damiani, attacked women as "tidbits of the devil ... stuff of sin". A fight with Henry IV followed as to who had the right to nominate the Milan bishop, and it spread into Germany, which at the time was in a semi-permanent state of civil war. Holland is very good at sorting out this central question of German history, which led towards the thirty years war and the country's failure to develop as a nation state. Back and forth the battle went, with excommunications, enlistments of thug-allies, family treacheries, until Henry IV decided to go to Canossa. In the short term, Gregory won, but he had been deceived: Henry advanced again, and Gregory died in exile. I have a bone to pick with Holland at this point. I do not think that he understands sex. Damiani was one of those fanatics - by nature a hermit, and a vegetarian - who advanced priestly chastity, an absurdity with no biblical backing; and the Patarene heresy was eventually taken up by the Cathars, who refused to eat anything that was the product of the sexual act.

Alain Besançon writes of the Cathars that they had "an intellectual hatred of creation". At the bottom of all this is a view of the world as hopelessly sinful which edges into the great theological question of the day: how far Jesus Christ was a man. The British do not really like questions of this sort, arguing that they are really to do with bureaucratic machinations. That is certainly Holland's view when he talks about the great schism of 1054 that divided the Latin from the Orthodox church: in Constantinople, priests married, a long-term consequence of which may even be that, whereas Latin Christianity is now going the way of the old Nestorians, Orthodoxy flourishes.

Holland is weaker on the Orthodox world than he is elsewhere. He is very good indeed, however, on the spread of the Normans, third-generation Vikings, who, in the mid-11th century, constructed a network from Iceland to the Black Sea, the centrepiece of which was post-Hastings Anglo-Normandy. They nearly took over France, and maybe the central question underlying Holland's book is: if they had succeeded, would France have become England? Many Frenchmen might like the idea, poor souls.

• Norman Stone's World War One: A Short History is published by Penguin.